The influence of environmental factors, the pollen : ovule ratio and seed bank persistence on molecular evolutionary rates in plants.

One of the main goals of molecular evolutionary biology is to determine the factors that influence the evolutionary rate of selectively neutral DNA, but much remains unknown, especially for plants. Key factors that could alter the mutation rate include environmental tolerances (because they reflect a plants vulnerability to changes in habitat), the pollen:ovule ratio (as it is associated with the number of mitotic divisions) and seed longevity (because this influences the number of generations per unit time in plants). This is the first study to demonstrate that seed bank persistence and drought tolerance are positively associated with molecular evolutionary rates in plants and that pollen:ovule ratio, shade tolerance and salinity tolerance have no detectable relationship. The implications of the findings to our understanding of the impact of environmental agents, the number of cell divisions and cell aging on neutral DNA sequence evolution are discussed.